So Dawn Goes Down
by odditycollector
Summary: The boy looks up at Tim, almost sad. "Don't you remember being a kid at all?" Crossover with Good Omens.


**So Dawn Goes Down**

--

It's Babs who finds it, of course. She's written a program that analyzes statistics from everywhere she can get her internet connection on, and there is something odd about Lower Tadfield. The crime rate is astonishingly low, and it invariably involves people from out of town. The accidents and medical emergencies are always spectacular and very rarely fatal. It always snows in December. It's always sunny in June. It always clears up just in time for the town picnic.

The chance of this collection of demographic data to arise on its own is very, very low. Better to bet against the existence of herself.

It seems like a benevolent enough force shaping the town, but Babs has seen enough places twisted into sickening parody by benevolent enough forces. Besides, it gives her the creeps.

Tim's in Paris, seeking out a sensei who is just a little bit better than anyone else at a very particular type of hand chop. She asks him to stop by England on his way back to Gotham and scope things out.

So after getting feedback on the precise angle at which to hold his thumb, Tim starts up the Bat-plane and goes north and goes west. His readouts tell him that it's cold and blustery in the Lower Tadfield area, except in the town itself, which is experiencing a mild sort of partly cloudy morning. Tim lands the plane just outside the apparent radius of influence of whatever is affecting the town and makes his way in. A few clouds billow dramatically after him, then seem to forget what they had come into town to pick up and break apart in confusion.

He's camouflaged in civilian clothes, and the townspeople he comes across are polite... but not unusually so, if he wasn't habituated to Gotham; if there's mind control going on, the effects are subtle. He witnesses two neighbours fighting over a fence - but that's okay, _everyone_ knows neighbours do that - and a woman checking her mail in a dress and apron that brings _The Stepford Wives_ to Tim's mind - at least, until she catches her thumb with the mail-box's door and shouts, "Fuck!"

People out walking their dogs stop to dispose of what those dogs leave on other people's lawns, but other than that it seems normal enough. It's not like Tim grew up in a small town, but he's travelled enough since becoming Robin to learn that smaller communities are just better at keeping their screwed up inner lives out of sight. Tim leans on a fence around a grassy field, where a few kids are playing a hybrid game of tag and shadowboxing. He watches the people moving past, trying to pick out who's cheating on their spouse, who's unhappy with their job… He's bad at this sort of game, Cass is exponentially better, but there's still an unmistakable taint of humanity about the place. He isn't doubting Babs' algorithms, but it could be just some energy source affecting the weather. A doctor with metahuman skills. They'd seen that sort of thing before.

"Don't you ever stop being a grown up?" Tim blinks and looks over. One of the kids running and shouting around the park had managed to sneak up on him. It's maybe the weirdest thing Tim has seen in the town so far. The boy grins at him, muddy and vibrant, and not sneaky at all. The opposite of sneaky, in fact; you can't help but look at him, even when, as now, he's wiping his nose on his sweatshirt's sleeve, spreading a grass stain across his face. The sun catches magnificently on his hair, as if it had been waiting excitedly five billion years for the chance.

And maybe there shouldn't be sun today, but it says a lot about Babs that she's so worried over the extra ray of sunlight. About not enough people dying, about not enough tragedy. About the evidence of too many picturesque Christmases.

It says a lot about Tim, too, that he knows she isn't wrong.

Another kid is running towards them, laughing, but she's still twenty seconds away. The boy's expression shifts a little, and Tim is suddenly aware that he is being looked at _back_. Tim recognizes that he should be more unnerved, but the kid looks so earnest it's hard. He thinks of Clark, with his shining, unlikely city, where they know that even if the sun doesn't come up, Metropolis's golden son will.

And Superman learned how to be human in a town just like this, Tim knows. Full of smiling, safe people, all their darkness hidden on the inside.

The boy kicks at the ground. He looks back up at Tim, almost sad. "Don't you remember being a kid at all?"

"I --" says Tim, but then the girl interrupts them in a burst of red hair and excitement. She's holding an old volleyball dyed mud brown and grass stain green.

"Hey! Brian wins 'cause he found a slug that's this big!" She shakes both hands for emphasis; apparently the slug is about the size and shape of a volleyball. "Wensley and Brian are poking it with a stick!"

"Cor!"

"Now we're playing Second Sunday Jump Ball, but it doesn't work with three." She eyes Tim. "You a righty or a lefty?"

"Um. Righty," Tim says.

"'K." She tosses him the ball, and he manages to get his hands around even though it's slippery with mud. "Then you gotta tap twice before tossing. No teams this time, but no go-backs either." Pepper and Adam take off across the field, and Tim chases after them. It's hard to run on the fresh-cut grass, but he only falls once.

Brian darts out to his right. Tim jumps twice, toes pointed, and lobs the ball at him. It misses, but now Brian and Adam are both running after it while Tim can find a branch with leaves and go after Pepper.

She's ready for him, brandishing a branch of her own, but both the leaves fall off while she waves it around. Tim pokes her shoulder with his own branch and it's supposed to be a penalty, but Pepper shouts, "No fair!" and suddenly it's a sword fight instead. Pepper's got the advantage - Tim's branch has got so many leaves it's like trying to parry with an overloaded feather - but Brian interrupts them by running up behind Tim and bouncing the ball off his head.

"Hey!" says Tim. "No go-backs!"

"Go cry about it," says Pepper, wrestling Tim's leaf-laden branch from him and thwapping him on the arm. Tim scowls and kicks the volleyball at Wensleydale, who catches it. And then there's a brief scuffle because that's not covered in any of the rules.

Adam's the best at skipping stones - once he got a rock to skip twice! They all saw! - but when they go down to the pond, Tim almost gets a stone all they way across the pond, which is at least four skips wide. Pepper threatens to beat him up for cheating, and Wensley bets him that he can't do it again from a tree. Tim says he can too; he stops trying to keep Pepper from climbing up after him and asks her to pass him a rock instead.

When he throws the rock at the pond from his new vantage point, it sinks with a loud splash. "Hah!" says Wensley, but Adam stares after it, considering.

"I reckon," Adam says, "that he just isn't close enough. He was lots closer the first time." And Adam's the expert on the subject, so they give Tim another rock and he inches forward on the branch. This time the rock strikes the water once, gives a half-hearted hop, and falls sideways into the water. There's a group cheer, and Tim grins at his victory. They give him a new rock.

Tim slides up the branch until it begins to wobble underneath him, and then moves forward a little bit more. He decides on a spot to aim at, brings back his arm to throw… and hears a worrying creak and a snap and a loud splash and he's pawed his way back to the surface before he's sure what happened.

"Do you need to be rescued?" Adam shouts hopefully. Tim doesn't, but he's lost the rock, and he's damp and unhappy until Pepper tells him that, anyway, she knows he did it properly the first time, after which he's just damp.

Then they play Gotham Alley for a while, but they never get very far because everyone keeps wanting to be Secretly Batman, even after Adam says that it's okay for the Innocent Victims to be Secretly Batman, and the Hiding Bystander, but it's probably pushing it if the Crazy Muggers are Secretly Batman, too...

And then it starts getting dark, and Wesleydale's got to go home, and so do Brian and Pepper...

And then it's just Tim and Adam, standing on the sidewalk, listening to the clanging of bicycle bells vanishing into the distance. And Adam says, "I s'pose you've got to go home too." Tim is puzzled by this, because 'home' is a fuzzy concept, something other people have, where other parents wait in other houses for other kids to come back five seconds late, so they can point to other watches and tap other feet meaningfully and say things about other dinners getting cold.

And at the same time, there's something nagging in the back of Tim's mind that, yes, there are people who are probably very impatient for Tim to check in with them, and that one of them is _Tim_.

But: "I don't want to," Tim says. "I don't want today to be over."

Adam nods at this. "That's the thing about days," he says. "They've got to be over sometime. Else there'd never be room for new days." Tim scuffs at the sidewalk with a shoe. "It's like how, if it was still yesterday, we wouldn't have got to have today."

"I don't care. I don't want a new day," says Tim. He wipes at his eye with a dirty hand, and the mud stings. "Today was fun."

"Well, maybe there'll be another day that's more fun."

Tim stops sniffling. "You mean," he says slowly. "I can come back?"

"Don't see why not," says Adam. "You can teach us the trick with the skipping stones."

He winks at Tim, and Tim brightens up. Adam swings himself onto his bike. "I think you've got to go that way," Adam says, pointing down the road out of Lower Tadfield. Then he peddles off, waving backwards at Tim with one hand, playing a mono-note bicycle bell symphony with the other.

Tim turns around and runs down the sidewalk, skipping over the cracks. The clouds have gotten together to hide the moon, accomplished finally in their cloudly duties, but lights are starting to go on in houses and in street-lamps. It's enough to give shape to the shadows, and Tim invents a complex skipping game as he goes, darting in and out of the illuminated places and counting under his breath.

He hasn't seen evidence of anything worrying in Lower Tadfield, Tim thinks, as he spins counter-clockwise to one side. Babs is right, of course; there's probably something strange going on, but it doesn't feel malevolent. Tim jumps entirely over a broken piece of sidewalk and makes a perfect landing on the other side. He's had experience with the sort of evil that lurks beneath, waiting for the right time to claw its way out. Then, he could almost taste the expectation on the air.

This doesn't feel like that. It feels like - Tim skips backwards and steps to the left with his right foot, then untangles himself and runs forward - like life is just going on, in the lazy way that he imagines life goes when it doesn't have millions of other lives jostling it to move the hell out of the way. It feels... contented.

As he hops the line where sidewalk turns into shoulder, Tim raises a hand to scratch his forehead. His fingers touch skin, and he pulls his hand back abruptly. His feet stop moving, and the night seems to lurch forward around him. Tim remains still for a moment, uncertain, unused to jumping and laughing through the shadows and not wearing any mask at all.

It's hailing just outside Lower Tadfield. Tim runs for the shelter of the Bat-plane and leaps into the cockpit. He starts the plane's systems, leaving the radio off until he's certain enough that his thoughts are his own.

"Hi, Little Bird," says Babs, as soon as he's flicked the switch. "This is Big Sister calling. What do you think of our sleepy little town?"

"It's inconclusive," Tim says back. "There's no immediate danger, but I'd like to return for further observation."

"You sure?"

"Reasonably sure," he says, and brings the plane into the air. The sound of the engines is as muffled as high powered jets can be _un_reasonably expected to be, but the vibration of the take-off rattles through the plane. Tim grins, suddenly feeling invisible and powerful and very, very cool. "And Babs," he adds. "Next time, why don't you come with me."

"Hey, boy wonder, it's your party," says Babs.

Tim circles once before turning and aiming the plane at Gotham. He roars over the Atlantic, chasing down the day.


End file.
